Discover Top Posts Tagged with #enlightenment16

Enlightened

During my workout this morning, I was thinking about the semester and all the things I learned in my different classes. A huge takeaway from the Enlightenment is the understanding that every piece of our culture says a different thing about us. Our professor briefly touched upon the topic of cultural studies (cultural criticism), and I never got the chance to study this topic in depth during college, but I hope to take a deeper look at it over the course of my life. It’s so interesting that all these things we do mindlessly make up our identity. The face that I was working out at 7:00 p.m. on a spinning bike that probably cost $1,500 days a ton about my society. We have enough time and money to get up early and exercise. I imagine that people’s exercise used to come from laborious jobs, but I’m in a class of people that don’t have laborious jobs. (Unless you count the kid I went to HS with who is a SoulCycle instructor. I don’t count him.) The fact that we have created expensive exercise equipment for people to take time of their days to work on their bodies seems crazy when you think about it. I wonder what the writers of the Enlightenment would think of this. My point is that this class opened my eyes to the ways that our identities construct our culture (and vice versa). I am grateful to have had this experience, and I will take my new outlook on culture onto my next stage of life.

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PaMeLa

4.8

Text:

Mrs. Jervis gave me her Smelling-bottle, and had cut my Laces, and sat me in a great Chair and he call’d her to him: How is the Girl said he? I never saw such a Fool in my Life. I did nothing at all to her. Mrs. Jervis could not speak for crying. So, he said, she has told you, it seems, that I was kind to her in the Summer- house, tho’ I’ll assure you, I was quite innocent then as well as now; and I desire you to keep this Matter to yourself, and let me not be nam’d in it. (Pg. 32)

Thoughts:

This passage I found particularly chilling. The way Mr. B is so quick to tell Mrs. Jervis that he “did nothing at all to her” and discredit Pamela’s character made me feel slightly sick. And once he realizes Mrs. Jervis in fact already knows he attempted to rape her, he qualifies his actions as being “quite innocent then as well as now.” His lies are built around his social class standing and what significance that is meant to hold. Men of the upper class are not meant to attack young servant girls they are supposed be honorable and respectable worthy creatures of their class. Yet Mr. B is the a most retched man who doesn’t appear to care particularly about how a moral human should act let alone someone in his social class. However, that doesn’t mean to say he doesn’t care about how people perceive him. Mr. B’s reputation is everything to him, the idea that he upholds the vision of an elite upper-class man is intensely important to his ego. Therefore he calls Pamela “a Fool” and claims he did nothing to her in hopes Mrs. Jervis won’t speak a word of it to anyone. And he goes even further to directly tell Mrs. Jervis “to keep this Matter to yourself, and let me not be nam’d in it.” His grossly manipulative manner comes across as he tells Mrs. Jervis she now knows nothing of the matter demonstrating Pamela is of little consequence to him.

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Kant and Animals

4.4

Text:

But since all animals exist only as means, and not for their own sakes, in that they have no self-consciousness, whereas man is the end, such that I can no longer ask: Why does he exist? as can be done with animals, it follows that we have no immediate duties to animals; our duties towards them are indirect duties to humanity. Since animals are an analogue of humanity, we observe duties to mankind when we observe them as analogues to this, and thus cultivate our duties to humanity. (Pg. 212)

Analysis:

This excerpt comes from Kant’s Lectures on ethics and specifically how ethics pertain to animals. What Kant argues is animals exist “not for their own sakes” because “they have no self-consciousness” but for the means of humans. Kant maintains his view that humans exist and serve a purpose because “man is the end, such that I can no longer ask: Why does he exist?” Although this appears to be a rather circular argument Kant feels the purpose of humanity is undeniable while the purpose of animals is questionable at best. Therefore animals exist mainly to act to serve “duties to mankind,” so in simpler language they live to serve. Kant’s assertion that animals exist without any self-conscious is one founded on conjecture and not from any preexisting knowledge or science for that matter as since today we know animals that are able to communicate with each other, one example being dolphins. This form of communication probably indicates they have some form of self-conscience because communication is hardly ever done without some form of thinking.

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BeEs bzzz bzzzz

3.30

Text:

The Moral.

Then Leave Complaints: Fools only strive

To make a Great an Honest Hive

I’ enjoy the World’s Conveniences

Be fam’d in War, yet live in Ease,

Without great Vices, is a vain

Eutopia seated in the Brain.

Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live,

While we the Benefits receive:

Hunger’s a dreadful Plague, no doubt,

Yet who digests or thrives without?

Analysis:

The Moral follows the preface and the entirety of the fable as a quick rap up and take away. The author of The Fable of the Bees is Bernard Mandeville and in the first stanza of this moral he is articulating his disregard for “fools only strive// To make a Great an Honest Hive.” This appears to insinuate that Mandeville’s final thoughts on the matter of society or as he ascribes the hive too is that it is an impossible task to have a just and honest society and corruption and deceit is inevitable and inescapable. Mandeville goes on to describe the great vices, as “Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live” again reinstating the idea that our vices are too strong to overcome permanently. Mandeville also writes, “Hunger’s a dreadful Plague, no doubt, // Yet who digests or thrives without?” The answer to this question he poses “Yet who digests or thrives without” while pertaining to a lack of food is most likely the wealthy. Since the wealthy always go hungry last in famine if they even go hungry at all because they have the resources to find outsourced food while the poor have no such resources and continue to starve. This depressingly realist view is shown throughout the entire poem but is condensed into a page length format to hammer the point home by Mandeville.

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Voltaire or Veep?

As a diehard Veep fan, it’s difficult not to find similarities between the styles in Voltaire and Veep, the HBO comedy series. Both are satire and use humor to comment on the current state of our society. Candide pokes fun at the institutions that people spend their whole lives worshipping, such as the Church, and Veep similarly pokes fun at the way our government runs. Both the Church in Enlightenment England and the government in today’s United States assert major control over people’s daily lives. In challenging the validity of their power, Voltaire and the creators of Veep make people question their priorities. Both take these seemingly God-like institutions and humorously undermine their power and make them human.

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Still Becoming Enlightened

It is so surprising to me that the themes of popular culture and entertainment don’t seem to have greatly changed since the Enlightenment. In this class, we looked at works involving so many different things that are still pertinent today. For example, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication on the Rights of Woman is rooted in equality and social justice, specifically gender equality. We have come so far towards attaining gender equality, but we still struggle each day to achieve it. Women still fight for equality; it’s just a different type of equality. Now, women fight for equal pay, paid family leave, and the right to choose. Robinson Crusoe’s themes pervade popular culture, as well. Robinson Crusoe is greedy and self-obsessed. He is like the original Wolf of Wall Street. His struggle to work with and understand people different from him is also a theme in movies, books, and film. I just read Coates’ Between the World and Me, and much of it focussed on the inability of races to communicate with one another, a theme shown in Robinson Crusoe. The things that people thought were important enough to write about are still on the minds of writers and artists today.

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Late Night Thoughts on Hogarth

3.18

I’ve decided to take the to write about my feeling on William Hogarth. There are a lot of feelings on the subject and some feelings cannot even be correctly articulated mainly due to my confusion over the plates created by William Hogarth. To clarify the confusion does not come from a lack of liking because in many ways it’s the opposite, I find his story telling through engraving wondrously impressive but mainly overwhelming. I think this is due to all the madness that is happening in each piece. For example the first plate of A Midnight Modern Conversation includes eleven people in it, and that is small number compared to previous pieces I’ve seen of his. All of the men seem to be absurdly drunk, okay, I can get that but then when you look more into each action of these stumbling drunks that is when things get more intricate. Every single one of the men serves a purpose if there is one thing I have learned about William Hogarth’s plate there is never just a person filling a space for an idle reason. This is what is so compelling about Hogarth as an artist he creates a scene of mayhem and madness and it’s overwhelming, yes, but you still have a longing to know what it all means. And that is why he confuses me because I can never get to that end goal! How each character fits into the story, how the clock means to tell a certain narrative in itself and how the fallen bottle represents something other than just drunkenness. I’m not at the level of full comprehension of his pieces and I think I should end this with something grossly hopeful but unfortunately I think I might have plateaued with Hogarth. But don’t worry I’ll sneak something cheesy in here, that doesn’t mean my lack of appreciation for him will diminish any less.

--> Ellen Page relates how this post is basically randomness and how a shrug encapsulates my emotions on randomness at this point in my life

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VoLtAiRe

3.16

Text:

‘Now tell us this, my dear Pangloss,’ said Candide. ‘While you were being hanged, and dissected, and beaten, and made to row in a galley, did you continue to believe that all was for the best?’-‘I hold firmly to my original views,’ replied Pangloss. ‘I am a philosopher after all: it would not do for me to recant, given that Leibniz is incapable of error, and that pre-established harmony is moreover the finest thing in the world- not to speak of the plenum and the material subtilis.’

Analysis:

Pangloss’ refusal to accept that being hanged was not the best of scenarios is the epitome of the idiocy of his philosophy. The reasons he won’t accept that his philosophy is invalid are do to the simple reason, “I am a philosopher after all: it would not do for me to recant, given that Leibniz is incapable of error.” The pure stubbornness that is shown by Pangloss is almost admirable he was “hanged, and dissected, and beaten, and made to row in a galley” but he still believes it was all meant to happen the way it did. And why? Because of the “pre-established harmony” and this harmony is created through the constant mantra that all is for the best. And Pangloss is too far committed to admit defeat he will have to continue living a life that accepts his own untimely death as part of the “pre-established harmony.” This is Voltaire’s cleverly crafted satirical sarcasm at play as he directs his readers to all the misgiving and misfortunes occur when you so thoroughly commit yourself to one idea and one idea alone.

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